We examined the hypothesis that people can modulate their mind wandering on the basis of their expectations of upcoming challenges in a task. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which participants were presented with an analog clock, via a computer monitor, and asked to push a button every time the clock's hand was pointed at 12:00. Importantly, the time at which the clock's hand was pointed at 12:00 was completely predictable and occurred at 20-s intervals. During some of the 20-s intervals, we presented thought probes to index participants' rates of mind wandering...

Persuasion is a foundational topic within psychology, in which researchers have long investigated effective versus ineffective means to change other people's minds. Yet little is known about how individuals' communications are shaped by the intent to persuade others. This research examined the possibility that people possess a learned association between emotion and persuasion that spontaneously shifts their language toward more emotional appeals, even when such appeals may be suboptimal. We used a novel quantitative linguistic approach in conjunction with controlled laboratory experiments and real-world data...

In adults, greater social integration is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, including hypertension. Social integration earlier in life may be similarly associated with cardiovascular risk. Using a longitudinal sample of 267 Black and White men, we examined whether greater social integration with peers during childhood and adolescence, assessed by parent report, prospectively predicts lower blood pressure and body mass index two decades later in adulthood and whether these effects differ by race, given well-documented racial disparities in hypertension...

Drawing on psychological and sociological theories of crime causation, we tested the hypothesis that genetic risk for low educational attainment (assessed via a genome-wide polygenic score) is associated with criminal offending. We further tested hypotheses of how polygenic risk relates to the development of antisocial behavior from childhood through adulthood. Across the Dunedin and Environmental Risk (E-Risk) birth cohorts of individuals growing up 20 years and 20,000 kilometers apart, education polygenic scores predicted risk of a criminal record with modest effects...

Mind-sets (aka implicit theories) are beliefs about the nature of human attributes (e.g., intelligence). The theory holds that individuals with growth mind-sets (beliefs that attributes are malleable with effort) enjoy many positive outcomes-including higher academic achievement-while their peers who have fixed mind-sets experience negative outcomes. Given this relationship, interventions designed to increase students' growth mind-sets-thereby increasing their academic achievement-have been implemented in schools around the world...

Sequential evaluation is the hallmark of fair review: The same raters assess the merits of applicants, athletes, art, and more using standard criteria. We investigated one important potential contaminant in such ubiquitous decisions: Evaluations become more positive when conducted later in a sequence. In four studies, (a) judges' ratings of professional dance competitors rose across 20 seasons of a popular television series, (b) university professors gave higher grades when the same course was offered multiple times, and (c) in an experimental test of our hypotheses, evaluations of randomly ordered short stories became more positive over a 2-week sequence...

Déjà vu is beginning to be scientifically understood as a memory phenomenon. Despite recent scientific advances, a remaining puzzle is the purported association between déjà vu and feelings of premonition. Building on research showing that déjà vu can be driven by an unrecalled memory of a past experience that relates to the current situation, we sought evidence of memory-based predictive ability during déjà vu states. Déjà vu did not lead to above-chance ability to predict the next turn in a navigational path resembling a previously experienced but unrecalled path (although such resemblance increased reports of déjà vu)...

Research has established that competing head to head against a rival boosts motivation and performance. The present research investigated whether rivalry can affect performance over time and in contests without rivals. We examined the long-term effects of rivalry through archival analyses of postseason performance in multiple high-stakes sports contexts: National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Men's Basketball and the major U.S. professional sports leagues: National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and National Hockey League (NHL)...

Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual's experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective realism involves changes in visual perception (i.e., affect changes how participants see neutral stimuli). In two studies, we used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression, to present affective images outside of participants' conscious awareness...

Reciprocity and reputation are powerful tools for encouraging cooperation on a broad scale. Here, we highlight a potential side effect of these social phenomena: exacerbating economic inequality. In two novel economic games, we manipulated the amount of money with which participants were endowed and then gave them the opportunity to share resources with others. We found that people reciprocated more toward higher-wealth givers, compared with lower-wealth givers, even when those givers were equally generous...

Research suggests that people prefer confident to uncertain advisors. But do people dislike uncertain advice itself? In 11 studies ( N = 4,806), participants forecasted an uncertain event after receiving advice and then rated the quality of the advice (Studies 1-7, S1, and S2) or chose between two advisors (Studies 8-9). Replicating previous research, our results showed that confident advisors were judged more favorably than advisors who were "not sure." Importantly, however, participants were not more likely to prefer certain advice: They did not dislike advisors who expressed uncertainty by providing ranges of outcomes, giving numerical probabilities, or saying that one event is "more likely" than another...

Longstanding interest has been directed toward the etiology of sociopolitical attitudes. Personality traits have been posited as antecedents; however, most work addressing such links has been limited to cross-sectional study designs. The current study used data from two large (both Ns > 8,700), longitudinal cohorts of individuals from the United Kingdom who were parent-assessed on a measure of temperament (assessing anxiety, conduct problems, and hyperactivity) at age 5 or 7 years and on a range of sociopolitical attitudes at age 30 or 33 years...

Modern technologies such as YouTube afford unprecedented access to the skilled performances of other people. Six experiments ( N = 2,225) reveal that repeatedly watching others can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. The more people merely watch others perform (without actually practicing themselves), the more they nonetheless believe they could perform the skill, too (Experiment 1). However, people's actual abilities-from throwing darts and doing the moonwalk to playing an online game-do not improve after merely watching others, despite predictions to the contrary (Experiments 2-4)...

Recent studies have demonstrated people's propensity to adopt others' visuospatial perspectives (VSPs) in a shared physical context. The present study investigated whether spontaneous VSP taking occurs in mental space where another person's perspective matters for mental activities rather than physical actions. Participants sat at a 90° angle to a confederate and performed a semantic categorization task on written words. From the participants' point of view, words were always displayed vertically, while for the confederate, these words appeared either the right way up or upside down, depending on the confederate's sitting position...

Viral social media content has been heralded for its power to transform policy, but online responses are often derided as "slacktivism." This raises the questions of what drives viral communications and what is their effect on support for social change. We addressed these issues in relation to Twitter discussions about Aylan Kurdi, a child refugee who died en route to the European Union. We developed a longitudinal paradigm to analyze 41,253 tweets posted 1 week before the images of Aylan Kurdi emerged, the week they emerged, and 10 weeks afterward-at the time of the Paris terror attacks...